James Cameron: Government Ignored His Solution To Oil Spill Cleanup

Apparently Kevin Costner and Jimmy Buffett weren’t the only entertainment moguls trying to solve the BP oil spill this summer.

If “Titanic” and “Avatar” have taught us anything, it’s that James Cameron is way, way ahead of other directors when it comes to the latest technology. But it doesn’t stop at special effects and 3-D. Apparently, when it comes to technology, Cameron is also way, way ahead of the U.S. government and the best efforts of multi-national energy conglomerates like BP.

In a new interview with MTV News, Cameron reports that he assembled a crack team of the “creme de la creme of the deep submergence community” and arrived at the solution that was finally used to stop the leak two months before it was actually put in place.

“We worked [on] the problem for a couple of weeks,” he told MTV news, “and submitted a 25-page report to the Department of Energy and … to the [U.S.] Coast Guard that said what to do. It was promptly ignored by everyone and guess what? At the end of the day, they did exactly what we recommended.”

Cameron felt snubbed by the government’s ignoring his report. While he and his team had submitted their findings for what proved to be a viable solution to the leak, BP and the Department of Energy were futzing around with Band-Aid solutions like the “Junk Shot,” which attempted to plug the leak with miscellaneous debris. A tech purveyor like Cameron who’s framed some of the most iconic “shots” of the last decade could have told you that a “junk shot” was not going to do the trick.

Of the officials’ reluctance to take his plans seriously, Cameron said, “I also think it’s because the source of the report was contaminated in their minds because there was a Hollywood guy involved.”

It’s been a summer of celebrity media playing in the policy arena—Rolling Stone’s General McChrystal outing and Wikileaks‘ Afghanistan missives reinvented how “popular” media could impact the real world.

But while Kevin Costner’s oil machines tried sucking up oil from the surface of the gulf and Jimmy Buffett’s shallow-water skim boats offered their own cleanup effots, James Cameron’s report outlined the technology insight to successfully seal the well months before the government and BP arrived at the same conclusion.

The takeaway? Next time James Cameron announces he’s the king of the world, maybe we should listen up.